A fully articulated humanoid dexterous hand with human-level joint structure enabled by linkage-based actuation

Practical Tips

Practical tips and how-to guidance will be added by our editorial team.

中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站将优先为睡眠改善、失眠治疗、助眠方法等高价值文章补充中文说明。

Article Summary

Humanoid dexterous hands are a core component of embodied intelligence, enabling robots to translate high-level intent into rich and adaptive physical interaction. However, existing designs remain constrained by a persistent trade-off among anthropomorphic kinematic complexity, mechanical robustness, load capacity and control simplicity, limiting dexterous manipulation in unstructured environments. Here we present Torch-Hand, a fully articulated humanoid dexterous hand that replicates the joint structure and motion hierarchy of the human hand with 21 degrees of freedom (DOF), comprising a highly articulated five-DOF thumb and four DOF in each of the remaining fingers. The differentiated thumb integrates multi-axis CMC motion to provide broad opposition and flexible contact orientation relative to the four fingers. Unlike tendon-driven or hybrid actuation approaches, Torch-Hand adopts an entirely linkage-based transmission architecture. By integrating screw-linkage actuation, the hand achieves high grasping force and substantial payload capacity while maintaining a compact anthropomorphic form. Its actuation architecture is optimized for control tractability, with all actuators integrated within the palm and arranged in a serial-robot-like configuration that establishes a direct correspondence between motor motion and joint kinematics. This architecture mechanically decouples functional DOF to reduce unintended inter-joint motion propagation, while allowing independently addressable DOF to be actively coordinated into coupled multi-joint motion patterns during complex manipulation. Comprehensive experiments assess reachable workspace, coordinated fingertip trajectories, thumb opposition, 33-grasp taxonomy coverage, grasping force, payload capacity and task-level manipulation. These results establish Torch-Hand as a robust hardware foundation for dexterous embodied manipulation.

Sources & References

• Original source
• Full article (PDF)

Comments